


Arsonist’s Lullaby

by orphan_account



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Burning, Dark!Lance, Gen, I’d like to issue a formal apology to my beta, Mentions of self-harm, Self-Harm, Self-Mutilation, Traumatic Experiences, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-08
Updated: 2018-06-08
Packaged: 2019-05-18 23:12:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14862113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Lance had never liked fire. It always took more than you thought.





	Arsonist’s Lullaby

**Author's Note:**

> Mood Music: Arsonist’s Lullaby by Hozier

Lance had never liked fire. His mother had been burning photographs—she had no face on while doing it, not even clenching the lighter in a too-hard grip.

 

Fire takes. Only takes. Anything it gave was not of its nature. Warmth. Light.

  
It cared only of what it could consume.

 

He had never liked fire. A man from his childhood had a tattoo of a burning skull—Lance had gazed at it until the rest of the world fell to ash. The man never had been caught. Maybe he was still burning down buildings in Los Angeles.

 

He was eleven, having to pretend his house was a fireplace. The heat streamed past his face at seventy miles an hour. Dogs were barking. People were screaming. Later, Lance would remember these things, but all he could hear was his house on fire.

 

He had always been able to pick out the fire people. There were much fewer of them than there were water, or air—they always burned out before Lance could know them. Or they burned, period. He didn’t trust the fire people after being eleven.

 

There was a fire person at the space school, moving so fast Lance could see flames curling out from his mullet. When he opened his mouth, smoke came out, clouding whatever he said, making Lance angry.

 

That was the problem, he thought, with Voltron; they had tried to put a fire person at the lead. Fire people couldn’t handle responsibility to save their life.

 

“Keith! Don’t do this,” Lance begged. He grimaced. Something in his throat had burned at the friction of the emotions leaving him. “Keith!”

 

Keith roared like a lion, fire trying to find its voice, but he pulled back. He pulled back. Lance breathed out, a silent gasp of relief—

 

“—Pay attention to me, Lance,” Pidge said, pulling him out of his head. “I’ve been asking you to hand me pliers for five minutes.”

 

“Sorry,” Lance said, rummaging around Pidge’s toolbox. “You know it’s impossible to find anything in this thing.”

 

“What’s bothering you?” Pidge asked as Lance laid her pliers in her waiting hand. “Not that I don’t mind the company, but you never come to hang out unless something’s on your mind.”

 

“Just thinking,” Lance said. “Only thinking.”

 

“About what?” Pidge demanded. She twisted something deep inside whatever machine she was working on, causing it to squeeze warning hisses.

 

Lance gazed at the machine with hooded eyes. “You ever play Chicken?”

 

“No. The game where you hold your hand over open flame? No. Though I thought that part in Jessica’s Body where Jessica held a lighter to her tongue was hot.”

 

“I have,” Lance mused, thinking about how dumb he used to be. “It’s so… intense. It feels like you’re killing your nerves. Like you’re burning up your soul.”

 

Pidge set her pliers down. “Matt played Chicken once. He lost. Said it hurt a lot, and his hand was burnt up after.” She reached into the machine.

 

Lance watched with some amount of trepidation. “Be careful,” he said half-heartedly. “That thing wouldn’t think twice to cut off your hand.”

 

“Please, I’ll be fine—” There was a zap, Pidge shrieked, and Lance was suddenly taking her hand out of the machine gently. He didn’t know how he acted so fast. That happened sometimes, when someone he loved was about to get seriously hurt.

 

Tears welled up in Pidge’s eyes. “Shh, shhh, let’s see what we’ve got here,” Lance said, holding Pidge’s arm steady. Her fingers were singed at the tip, and at first glance that seemed to be the worst of it. When Lance turned Pidge’s arm over, though, he had to duck down to keep Pidge from seeing the damage. “Okay. You’re going to be okay—nothing a little aloe vera can’t fix.”

 

Pidge whimpered. “How—how did you get… aloe vera… in space?”

 

“It’s a substitute,” Lance said, forcing his voice calm. “A good substitute. It’s in my room—don’t look at your arm, it won’t help.”

 

Pidge was quiet as she climbed to her feet. “It burns.”

 

“That’s what fire does to you,” Lance said, keeping his voice carefully neutral. Pidge shivered.

 

Once they landed in Lance’s room, he set about gathering his tools together. Pidge eased herself onto Lance’s bed and held her arm out in front of her, slowly massaging the unburnt parts.

 

“... Why do you even have aloe vera, Lance?” Pidge asked softly.

 

I use them to make my face masks, Lance wanted to say, even though it was a lie. He redoubled his efforts to leech the juice from the plant leaves. This sort of burn wouldn’t need skin grafts—Pidge was lucky. Not everyone was that lucky.

 

“Lance?”

 

I like the feeling of it was his second excuse, and it was sort of a half-truth. This alien substance was gooey, smooth, and easily applicable. It did feel like slime, though, and didn’t heal so much as soothed. So Lance added a few other chemicals he had stored under his bed to the aloe vera juice.

 

“Lance.”

 

Lance looked over his shoulder at Pidge, whose eyes were lit up with an internal fire. He swallowed and tried for a reassuring grin.

 

“When I was sixteen,” he said tightly, grabbing makeup wipes mechanically from his own toolkit, “my favorite pastime was playing Chicken with anyone I could. When I was eleven, a man with a tattoo of a burning skull burned down my house and made my father into the image he had put on his body.”

 

Pidge was quiet. Lance took an extra glob of the aloe vera juice and squeezed it onto his makeup wipe, then slowly dragged it down his face, running his fingers through the cloth over bumps in his skin.

 

He turned to face Pidge, a cynical tug in the corner of his mouth. “So. I kind of need it.”

 

Pidge was silent, for which Lance was grateful.

 

He turned back around and finished Pidge’s aloe vera mixture. “Great. Now, give me your arm.” He sat beside her on the bed and gently took her arm from her. He winced at the burnt flesh, mildly hypocritical of his own ruined face. Or aware. Or sympathetic. Empathetic?

He never knew the difference.

 

As Lance reached out for the bandages, Pidge said in a quiet voice, “You don’t need to hide it.”

 

Lance gave a twisted little smile. “I’d like to. I would. But I’m not that brave.”

 

They were quiet as Lance tied the bandages around Pidge’s arm. He was bent over his task, so didn’t see when she laid her head on his own, her floof of hair falling over them.

 

“You are so much braver than you think,” she whispered, the words floating on the air between them.

 

Lance watched her disappear as she left with a jar of the mixture and instructions to change bandages every night, thinking of his siblings screaming for him in the fire. The man with a burning skull looking down at him, Lance paralyzed by the dream, smiling, the both of them.

 

He grabbed the lighter, the one with red flames licking up the sides—the one he lent to Keith whenever he found another tobacco stick to fuel his bad habits—and headed to his bathroom.

 

Keith asked him once why he had a lighter when he didn’t smoke anything. He had shrugged and never answered the question, but Lance looked at his tired reflection with the burn scar tracing over his fine cheekbones and thought, This is why. This. Keith was a fool if he thought he was the only one with bad habits.

 

Lance flicked on the lighter, the fire fluttering with each breath he exhaled. Holding the wheel in place hurt his finger, but God, was it worth it. He stuck his tongue out, the whole thing ugly and gray in the bathroom’s fluorescent lighting.

 

The fire didn’t even hurt, reaching up and around his tongue. The tip faded to black, and Lance smiled around the flame, thinking he was the farthest thing from a fire person anyone could possibly be.

 

Chicken.

  
  


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

END

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Wowzers thank you so much for reading!!
> 
> I have officially graduated high school as of yesterday can you believe it?? I thought I’d be hit by a truck long before this moment. 
> 
> Please give all your thanks to the amazing [art](http://eliaesthetics.tumblr.com/post/174695413879/heres-my-other-lance-flash-bang-piece-in) by [Eli](http://eliaesthetics.tumblr.com/%20)!! This was written for the [Lance Flash Bang](http://voltronbigbang.tumblr.com/%20). Come yell at me on my writing Tumblr! I changed my name to @spinstersgrave, and plan to do the same for this account here. 
> 
> Comments and kudos are always appreciated! Thank you for reading!!


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